I agree, the show is fairly ******. It just pulls **** out of its ass like 90% of the time. The fanbase consists of people. As far as I'm concerned everyone currently alive is a cancer. So I just hate you all basically, stop stealing my oxygen.

The video game industry is one of the very few mediums of entertainment that is driving a technology market. The wide market for high performance computer parts means that they can be marketed at a lower price and their development time is shorter. Software development has been driven to come up with creative ways of cutting the fat out of code and designing more efficient ways to render and process data. In fact, the fact that consoles were 10 years out of date may end up being a huge benefit in the long run.

TL;DR: The video game market is driving innovation in hardware and software technology.

I don't know about the SAO community, but after watching it (didn't read the novels though), it really got in my nerves.
As an anime/manga fan and former MMO player, trying to mix shounen logic with a scripted game just fails miserably.
Going solo all the game, defeating bosses 1vs1 'cause everybody else is too busy telling the main character 'Ohhh be careful, don't die' 'Pleeease save me' instead of helping, every single girl playing is hot (total waste of the mirror-thing at the beginning) and ultimately defying the program itself.

Answer my why was i thumbed down, what is so good about this show that makes you love it?
It's original concept? Duh, Hack//Sign
The romance? It feels like it was written by an 7 year old who is just wondering how love works.
The animation? It was good, yeah, i can't deny that.
The music? Damn, it was good too
The action? It's average, it didn't suck but it didn't shine either.
The character design? Wat? There's a character design? Basically a loser who's just good at video games attracts every woman in 2 miles radius. I gotta say Asuna design sucked especially, after first episodes i thought she was going to be an amazing character, but she just turned into the less than average half tsundere half normal. And the BEST plot twist, SUGUHA WAS NOT KIRITO'S SISTER. WHAT. A. TWIST.
Consider my words and reply to my comment since feedback is so much better than just thumbing down. Thank you..(I'm sorry for my english, i was trying my best ;_;)

Hack//Sign may of had the concept but SAO did it way better and made a way better world too.

The Romance was cute and pretty much any average romance could be written by someone with half a brain, It's not that hard of a concept.

Animation,music and the action were great
Character design wasn't **** either and the biggest twist wasn't Suguha's identity it was both Hearthcliff's and Sigurd's betrayal that sold out their Guild and Race. ,Oberon's evil was obvious but he couldn't do anything about so not a big surprise. I for one didn't see Hearthcliff being Kayaba Akihiko coming. and if you did congrats but it still wasn't that obvious.

Everything is about taste and sorry but the majority of people don't like the **** Weaboo's tend to consider "God-like Anime" Most people only hate on it cause it got so popular like what's happening with Attack on Titan ,faggots are starting to hate on it and say "God it's not even that good ,it's to slow I don't understand all the hype" They specifically look for things that's wrong with it like ******* hipsters and I find it retarded. There you go hope this reply explains why people are hating on you. It's because they either feel your just being a faggot hipster or because they disagree with your opinion.

I love fantasizing. Whenever I'm not active I'm in my fantasy world and I'm living a zombie apocalypse or I'm an added character in the Game of Thrones. I am always myself though. I could be more muscular but it's always my face and my personality. Most of the times I even come from the "real" world through a portal of some kind. This because I always imagine those people closest to me to be there with me. Mostly they are my friends, but sometimes family too. After a period of fantasizing the fantasy - or any fantasy for that matter - starts to feel empty, void of meaning. And it is then that I realize that the fantasies I come up with are but illusions. It does not matter what I accomplish, whether it's saving the world or marrying the most beautiful woman on the planet, somewhere within myself I know I am but lying to myself. This takes away the pleasure of fantasizing because it is all futile and void of reality and meaning and slowly my fantasy fades away until only those things really important to me are left. That is who I am and what I chose to be: My face, my character/personality, my family and my friends. And it is then that I realize but more than that I feel that all things that truly matter to me are in the real world and that fantasizing is just a waste of time and this makes me sad.

I choose to escape reality because fantasy is so much better, because reality makes me sad and because I do not want to face reality, but all it does is show me the truth and that is that fantasy is not real, no matter how hard I try to believe in it.

And so I wonder, why would you prefer a fantasy world if you know it is void of meaning? If you know it is void of life?

You just described how I lived my whole childhood with my only friend. I used to spend nights drawing and creating and living in a fantasy world with her, because no one else than our imaginary friends liked us.

I've not seen GU, but based on the rest of .hack// that I've seen, SAO is better (until it becomes a sadistic porno. Ok, so only maybe 6 episodes are better. The point is if the writer after the first few episodes hadn't been changed to a horny teenage boy, it would have been amazing).

SAO does a better job at making the series have weight (people actually dying) than .hack//.

SAO would actually be a fun game. The .hack// game is combat only (no skills), tons of grinding, and randomly generated (aka boring) dungeons, and a couple hub towns which you have to teleport between because there is no overworld.
SAO has a huge number of skills ("infinite" according to the anime), hand made dungeons, plenty of non-dungeon space to explore between tens or hundreds of towns.
The only reason people think the .hack// game looks cool is because of the social element, which can be used in any game ever.

actually there are a lot of skills in the .hack// games, but its rather based on what weapons you are using. In the .hack//quantum OVA, it actually shows people in an alliance war scenario when they are pulled into the partition drive (meaning they can now feel pain and die) and actually shows the true emotions of people in that scenario. .Hack// was meant to be a light hearted series to show how people would cope in the beginning, while SAO was more about them trying to escape.

None of the anime that I watched, or the PS2 game had anything other than combat. (The anime had holiday events and pets, but that's not skills.)

And it is blatantly obvious in SAO that it has more than just combat... The straight out say it has "infinite skills" in the first episode, and most episodes after that mention cooking skill, or fishing skill, or smithing skill, or identification skill, or hide skill, or detect skill.

You've clearly never even watched it. You're just a .hack// fanboy who can't accept that .hack// is exclusively button mashing combat and has the most boring dungeons ever.

I'm not. SAO was an awful anime. After the first few episodes it became meh, and the second half was absolutely terrible.

The fact is, .hack// is only combat and social events. SAO is combat and tons and tons of non-combat skills.

It's a fact that .hack// would be a piece of trash game (which already exists many times over minus the VR), and SAO would be, well it would probably just be an ok game, not a great game, without the VR.

This has NOTHING to do with how you like the anime, it's base solely on the game presented in the anime.

Hey, I've been thinking of starting to watch these, I know there are also video games... Anyway as it often happens with series so BIG, I have no freakn clue as to where to start watching it. Can you help a brotha out?

Ok, I will want you to go from the start with .hack//sign. This is going to get you into knowing a bit about the series. It starts off slow, but it is pretty good. The downside to this is that it ends around the same time the first 4 games start, so its like a cliff hanger ending, but if that doesnt bother you, then dont worry.

The .hack//roots series is similar, but the series is just the base to the .hack//GU games, ending in another cliff hanger. They do have manga out there though that will fill you in on a lot of information (the mangas slightly different from the game) but it is entirely up to you.

After that, you have legend of the twilight which is non-canon, and if you didn't play the first 4 games, it wont be as interesting to you. There is .hack//Quantum as well which, in my opinion, is pretty cool, but you need some information about the series first, one piece of it comes from the .hack//gu games (huge middle finger to everyone else basically)

If you think this is a series that you may get really into, I suggest watching .hack//the movie, it was released recently in Japan and it is beautifully done and has made a lot of people into .hack//fans.

**VincentKing rolled a random image posted in comment #3685433 at Friendly **
You're welcome. Take this randomly generated image in return. If the movie doesnt interest you, it shows that the series isn't right for you. If you get really hyped up, then go to sign and work your way up, and at the end of it, rewatch the movie. I almost forgot, theres the .hack//trilogy movie which sums up the GU games into 2 hours I think.

I wasnt sure which series to do. Sign had it where tsukasa was the only one, and the first 4 games had it where people were in comas. In GU though, people were pulled into the game, and could feel the pain their characters felt.

You do realise you're making that statement on the internet? **** man just 200 years ago we didn't even use semi-conductors, let alone computers. 200 years is a fart in the breeze considering our evolutionary time-scale.

your also talking about something medical. anything medical has to go through rigorous tests before its even tested on humans. it could take up to twenty years before we even hear of something like nerve gear.

Man you know they've already made a basic link between two human brains right? I know a lot of **** is pure sci-fi but interfacing with neurological connections is something that's already been done with retinal implants. It's just a matter of time.

Even 20 000 years would be nothing compared to how long it took us to just evolve sentience.

Yes, in the same way that a piece of tinfoil etched and read mechanically with a needle is far off from a burned piece of plastic being read by a laser. Yes it is far reaching, but don't be discouraged by difficulty and time.

It shows that people in comas have brain function...
If they were ever really invented, you could hook them up to it, because they dont need to physically move they can be put mentally into the game, as well as their families so they can communicate with their families in the virtual world even though they are unable to speak to them in the physical world.

The first method again involves nanobots, keeping you in optimum health, rapid healing, and all the good stuff, but also neutering. The second is a cyborg body, capable of feeling, beyond human, but clearly no breeding. The last is to become purely digital, a god of your own world, creating anything you want, but not physically present at all

I think everyone will be able to get it, despite the expense, because of the interest that could be made off someone who has literally forever to pay i back. Plus it'll be encouraged to prevent further genetic breakdown

Indeed; it's the mmo that the .Hack// games, anime, etc takes place in. A lot of the .Hack// game plot comes from player v player or AI of some sort (Morganna, AIDA, etc), so I'm super-interested in seeing if CC could ever make an MMO that shows us the game-side story (history of the world, various towns, etc).

soo many ****** games O_O I think infection was the one I played also. Where bear (I think his name was bear) was teaching kite how to play the game then gets owned by the hacker/thingy whatever it was and ends up in a coma?